What’s the Point?: An Irreverent History of Point Pleasant Park

Every year, some two million visitors enter Point Pleasant Park, a unique 190-acre collection of paths, ponds, and port-o-potties; flora, fauna, and fungi, battlements, monuments, and burial mounds all situated at the far south end of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The number of visitors is astounding given the entire population of Halifax is presently about half a million people, a good many of whom believe that any aerobic exercise beyond reaching out the car window for a Tim Horton,s double-double is time poorly spent.

Of the folks who do enter the park each year, many are dog owners who bring their furry four-legged friends of near infinite variety—from beagles to bulldogs—to trot along the gravelled paths, sniff at the low-lying plant life, and interfere with morning reveries.

For more than three decades now, Steven Laffoley has trundled along the park,s twenty-five miles of paths, explored its fascinating geography, geology, and history, and admired its natural seasons in the birth, growth, and death of its flora. He has shared in its natural disasters, including brushes with voracious horned beetles and the harrying of howling hurricanes. And he has run along its paths in the sweltering heat of August, trudged through its knee-high snow in January, and inadvertently set himself adrift, shirtless and howling like a Viking, on its surprisingly fast-moving ice floes during a rare invasion of bergs in the harbour.

Yet, despite these memorable engagements, Laffoley knew relatively little about the park, at least in a narratively coherent way. So he set out to write about it, to meander along its muddied paths and pebbled trails to periodically stop and ask, “What the hell is that?” and “How in God’s name do I get out of here?” That is to say, he set out to ask in the most meaningful way possible—physically, historically, geographically, naturally, and spiritually—”What’s the Point?”